District CIO

In the ninth annual Digital School Districts Survey from the Center for Digital Education and the National School Boards Association, three school districts received top honors for technology integration.

The technology and education department at St. Michael-Albertville High School (St. Michael, Minn.) received the Program Excellence Award at the 2013 International Technology and Engineering Educators Association (ITEEA) conference, recently held in Ohio.

Don't have enough credit hours to teach a subject in high school? Apply to a Kansas tech school and teach the college course. Yes, some Kansas tech schools have advertised for instructors of general education courses and the minimum requirement is a bachelor’s degree with 24 credit hours of coursework in the subject taught.

The Board of Education is considering three separate policies geared toward improving the use and security of technology in Howard County (Md.) schools: Ensuring the proper security of all technology within the school system, defining the acceptable use of technology with the school system, and determining the proper use of social media among students and teachers.

The School District of Beloit, Wis. is hiring a Career Technical Education administrator. The new administrator will be in charge of all career technical education programming in the district, including its relationship with Blackhawk Technical College, overseeing advisory committees and curriculum development, working with the counselors for career exploration programming, and more.

District IT leaders are prioritizing BYOD, assessment readiness, and broadband access for their schools, despite that 80 percent predict flat or declining IT budgets for the upcoming year, according to the Consortium for School Networking’s (CoSN) first-of-its-kind National IT Leadership Survey.

At Dublin (Ohio) City Schools, Chinese teacher Dun Zhang teaches class in three different high school buildings—at the same time. With a shrinking budget and a desire to keep the foreign language program, the district moved to a blended model this year, with a combination of in-person, online, and video conference classes, to save money while reaching as many students as possible.

Three Texas middle school students joined marine veterans and a team of surgeons on a 12-day expedition through the jungles of Central America. The expedition was part of a science education program called Exploration Nation, featuring real students applying STEM topics to the real world.

A charter school to train high-schoolers for technical and engineering jobs could occupy the first floor of a planned 43-unit affordable apartment project the Northwest Side Community Development Corp. is proposing on West Capitol Drive in Milwaukee.